Two
After the first man had dropped, nearly headless, Bolan swiveled slightly to his right. It was enough for him to bring the tunnel’s entrance under fire from where he lay in the camo tarpaulin’s shade.
The men who’d begun to drag the pallets of packaged cocaine from darkness into daylight were unarmed, but they had been escorted from the other side by three cartel gunmen, no doubt assigned to keep the worker ants from snorting up along the way, and to avert hijacking on the Texas side, at least until the coke was packed into the white RAV4s and headed north.
That raised the number of gunmen to eleven, counting the two drivers with their sidearms, and now minus one: the seeming leader of the pickup crew Bolan had dropped with his first shot.
There’d been two reasons for his choice. First, the man giving the orders would be difficult to take alive, for questioning. Second, Bolan was satisfied that any member of the mobile team would know where they were meant to take the load. At that location he would certainly find more men, probably someone from the cartel’s midlevel management, who would impart more information, whether he liked it or not.
But Bolan was taking care of first things first.
He didn’t mean to let the workers, with their escorts, duck back into hiding and escape to Mexico unscathed, and absolutely not with the cocaine they’d brought across. From what he’d glimpsed of shrink-wrapped kilos, he projected that three standard wooden pallets should be heaped with fifty parcels each, or close to that. The standard pallet measured nine square feet and weighed approximately thirty pounds. Two men apiece could drag a pallet bearing fifty keys, the total weight around 140 pounds, maybe allowing stops for rest along the way.
The grunts wouldn’t have counted on a full load going home, and at the moment, under fire, delivering the cargo seemed to be the last thing on their minds. The six Bolan could see from where he lay were trying to escape, but one of the cartel gunmen had blocked the tunnel’s entrance with his body, shouting threats at them and leveling an MP5K submachine gun at his cringing, pleading team.
Enough of that, Bolan thought, as he zeroed his telescopic sight and stroked the Steyr’s trigger lightly to dispatch another single shot. Downrange, he saw the guard vault over backward, crimson spouting from a chest wound, dropping half inside the tunnel’s mouth.
That left the dead man’s workers in a quandary. Should they run past his corpse, desert the unexpected battleground and risk reprisal later, or pick up his gun and join the fight? If certain death waited on both sides of the bleak equation...
Bolan made the choice for them, spotting the worker closest to the fallen thug and drilling him between his shoulder blades. The dead or dying man dropped to his knees, then toppled forward, face dropping into the lifeless soldier’s crotch and lodging there.
Under the present circumstances, no one seemed to find that humorous.
“Ready?” Bolan asked Grimaldi.
“And waiting.”
“Go!”
They rose as one and swept the camo tarp aside, leaving one end secured behind them with two tent stakes, so it couldn’t blow away. That was the least of Bolan’s problems at the moment, but he usually tried to take away whatever he’d discarded at a killing ground, except spent cartridges from the unregistered Steyrs, which wouldn’t ring a bell at any law-enforcement database.
Grimaldi kept pace with him as they ducked and weaved, charging the twin RAV4s and the gunmen around them. The morning had been nearly silent till the SUVs arrived, but now it echoed with gunfire and stank of burnt gunpowder.
To the Executioner, it smelled like coming home.
Home was where the Devil waited for him. Home was where he hunted evil men.
* * *
Manuel Ortega had his targets now, but whether he could bring them down was anybody’s guess. They weren’t running away, but rather rushing toward him, which he guessed should make the killing of them easier. But they were also firing on his crew as they advanced, showing no fear, and not letting rapid forward motion spoil their aim.
Ortega fired twice at the taller of the two men, knowing that he’d missed each time before his spent shell hit the dirt. He’d jerked the M9’s trigger both times, as he’d practiced not to do on firing ranges, but the training vanished from his mind like the previous night’s dream when he had live targets in front of him. Even defeated, kneeling in desert graves they’d dug themselves and weeping like pathetic children, they unnerved him.
That made him pathetic in his own eyes, and Ortega resolved that if this was to be his dying day, he would not take it lying down, groveling in the sand.
Get up, then! he told himself. Stand up and kill them.
Ortega clambered to his feet, squeezed off another shot and missed both of his enemies again. He then started toward the nearer SUV. Ignacio Azuela crouched beside its left-front fender, shielded from incoming bullets by the RAV4’s bodywork and engine block, while two of the gunmen Infante had commanded stood beside him, firing Russian AK-102 assault rifles across the car’s roof, toward their adversaries.
From the sound of them, Ortega knew their would-be slayers’ weapons fired the same 5.56 mm rounds. A single shot could turn him into a leaking monstrosity like Altair, bleeding out into the desert soil.
“How many shooters?” Azuela asked, as Ortega dropped beside him, bruising both knees on impact.
“I’ve seen two,” Ortega replied. “Who knows if there are more?”
“This was supposed to be an easy job,” Azuela said.
Standing above them, now reloading, one of Infante’s gunners snarled, “Shut up! Stand and fight, before I drill your ass myself.”
Ortega knew he was addressing both of them, muttered, “Shit!” underneath his breath, then shrugged at Azuela and struggled to his feet again, using his free hand to support himself on the RAV4’s fender. It was hot from baking in the Texas sun, but that brief pain was nothing, next to the anticipation of his gruesome death.
This was the price Ortega knew he’d someday pay for choosing the life he had: smuggling drugs, beating and killing men he’d sometimes never met before, though others had been his friends before orders turned them into targets.
Hearing a sound rise from his throat that soon became a battle cry, Ortega lunged around the RAV4’s grille and rapid-fired the M9 toward his enemies until its slide locked open on an empty, smoking chamber.
He was fumbling with a second magazine, inside one of his cargo pockets, when they cut him down.
* * *
Jack Grimaldi watched the pistolero fall, his breastbone drilled and shattered by a tumbling 5.56 mm slug, and felt no triumph from the kill he’d made. In fact, the only thing he usually felt after slaying an enemy—whether on foot and face-to-face or in an airborne duel—was sweet relief.
A stranger had meant to kill him, but had died himself, instead.
Grimaldi knew that any fight you walked away from was a win.
The man he’d shot had died
